THE STRANGE DISAPPEARANCE & ABDUCTION OF ADULTS

Today, The Grandma wants to share this following story by Roger Ballescà i Ruiz, and extends it not only to adults but also to teenagers who only live on social media; who base their self-esteem on the number of views they have; who have no criteria of their own because they don't make the effort to consider whether what they see or read is true or not; who let go of all their insecurities and complexes by writing toxic messages against other people; who have no ethical or moral respect for the lives of others; who have enormous emotional and social shortcomings that they believe they can make up for with followers and opinion groups; and who, without realizing it, are social prey for a future that will ignore them when they don't know how to recognize themselves beyond a tweet, a post or a like.

Several Mental Health projects nowadays treat these young people, already addicted, and the diagnoses are mainly grouped into 'the culture of the perfect image', 'body shaming', anxiety, depression, FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), different eating disorders and body dysmorphia.

The challenge is great because as teachers or health personnel, we can only guide and advise these young people, but they must be the first to be aware of the situation and their families, the main ones involved in avoiding these situations and, if they are already real, in working to reverse them.

Social Media or AI are not bad per se, but it is the use that is made of them that determines their positivity or negativity: teenagers addicted to screens, famous people in their sectors who do not know how to control their degree of exposure to social media, companies that take advantage of easy customers to place their products to an audience hungry for content, or simply, adults who have begun to disappear...

 

No one knows exactly how or when it started happening, but one day, the children realized that the last of the adults had disappeared and that, definitively, they were alone as owls.

It was not a sudden or spectacular disappearance. No sirens, dramatic headlines or committee of experts. They did not all disappear at once in a big puff of smoke. They disappeared little by little, with a subtle, almost imperceptible discretion.

The first to fall were those abducted by the screens. They took up space, breathed and even said things. But their gaze escaped into a parallel universe of notifications, emails and cat videos. The children spoke to them but the words bounced off them softly.

Then the ones swallowed up by work disappeared. Adults with their agendas as a natural extension of their bodies who always promised to be there "soon", "in a while", "maybe tomorrow..." Adults in a state of promise.

Others disappeared when they decided to stop setting limits. They confused education with "do whatever you want but don't yell". They decided that children would self-regulate and would know how to decide for themselves what was best for them.

There were also those who dissolved into educational protocols, into documents full of arrows and boxes. Some were transformed into algorithms, others into international diagnostic manuals, where each discomfort found an appropriate label.

Finally, the most disturbing of all: adults who became children. They dressed the same, talked the same, wanted to be colleagues and called you "bro".

When the children noticed this, they celebrated with enthusiasm. Chocolate, unsaturated fats and screens without stopping. Not a single "no" in sight. Absolute freedom with sugary taste and video game music.

For a while everything seemed magnificent. But then things started happening.

Some children didn't know when to stop. Others didn't know what to do when there was nothing to do. Anxieties appeared without an instruction manual, sadness that was difficult to explain, anger that shot out in any direction. Without adults, no one helped put words to what was going on inside and give it meaning. No one said: "this is not right", "this is scary but it happens".

They discovered, with perplexity, that freedom without limits does not always liberate. That growing up without guidance is dizzying.

Some children began to play the role of adults, with little trace and little success. Others showed symptoms in the body, thought or behavior. Still others, sadly, faded away, without making a sound.

And the adults? Well, no one really knows where they are. Maybe they're still looking at a screen. Maybe they're working overtime. Maybe they're "on a random schedule."

The thing is, the children are still alone like owls, looking around and waiting for someone to play the adult again. And with each passing day, the question becomes more uncomfortable:

What if the disappearance of the adults wasn't a passing accident, but the natural state of things?

Roger Ballescà i Ruiz

Psychologist and psychotherapist

Centre de Salut Mental Infantil i Juvenil de Martorell

 

The challenge is great, enormous, colossal, but from the teaching and training point of view we do not give up despite being fighting against everything and everyone, despite suffering an enormous lack of prestige, despite always being the bad guys in all the stories, but we will continue working to reverse these situations and help train people of present and future generations because it is our profession, and therefore, our obligation as teachers and as citizens of the society in which we have to live.

More information: University of California

 It is okay to own a technology, 
what is not okay is to be owned by technology. 
In an overwhelming attempt to capture memories, 
people have forgotten to make memories.

Abhijit Naskar

MENTAL HEALTH, OUR MOST IMPORTANT TREASURE

Today, The Grandma has visited Bellevue Hospital in Kips Bay, a center popularly associated with its treatment of mentally ill patients, to know more about how to invest in mental health.

The greatest number of labour absences is due to reasons that have a direct relation with mental health: stress, depression, anxiety are common words in a society that never has enough and that puts its citizens at the limit of their possibilities.

Please, take care of your mental health. Live without pressure. Enjoy the present. Be honest with your goals. Do not try to be who you are not. Take care of you and of yours.

More information: Mental Health America

Kips Bay, or Kip's Bay, is a neighbourhood on the east side of the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is roughly bounded by East 34th Street to the north, the East River to the east, East 27th and/or 23rd Streets to the south, and Third Avenue to the west.

According to The Encyclopedia of New York City and the New York City Department of City Planning, Kips Bay proper is generally bounded by East 34th Street to the north, the East River to the east, East 27th Street to the south, and Third Avenue to the west.

City documents have also used New York City census tract 70 (from 29th to 34th Streets, First to Third Avenues) as an approximation for Kips Bay, and referred to tract 66, immediately below it, as Bellevue South.

The American Guide Series defines the combined Kip's Bay-Turtle Bay area as running from 27th Street north 59th Street, and from Third Avenue to the East River, excluding the neighbourhoods of Beekman Place and Sutton Place.

For its entry on Kips Bay, the American Institute of Architects' AIA Guide to New York City uses the area from 23rd Street north to roughly 38th Street, and from the East River west to just past Second Avenue.

Other popular definitions of the neighbourhood, such as that by The New York Times, include 23rd Street to the south, 34th Street to the north, Lexington Avenue to the west, and the East River to the east. To the north is Murray Hill; to the west is Madison Square, NoMad, and/or Rose Hill; and to the south is the Bellevue area or the Gramercy Park neighborhood and Peter Cooper Village.

More information: Urban Areas

Kips Bay was an inlet of the East River running from what is now 32nd Street to 37th Street. The bay extended into Manhattan Island to just west of what is now First Avenue and had two streams that drained into it.

The bay was named after New Netherland Dutch settler Jacobus Hendrickson Kip (1631-1690), son of Hendrick Hendricksen Kip, whose farm ran north of present-day 30th Street along the East River.

The bay became reclaimed land, yet Kips Bay remains the name of the area. Kip built a large brick and stone house, near the modern intersection of Second Avenue and East 35th Street. The house stood from 1655 to 1851, expanded more than once, and when it was demolished was the last farmhouse from New Amsterdam remaining in Manhattan.

Iron figures fixed into the gable-end brickwork commemorated the year of its first construction. Its orchard was famous, and, when first President George Washington was presented with a sip of its Rosa gallica during his first administration (1789-1793), when New York was serving as the first national capital city, it was claimed to have been the first garden to have grown it in the Thirteen Colonies.

The neighbourhood has been rebuilt in patches, featuring both new high-rise structures often set back from the street, and a multitude of exposed party walls that were never meant to be seen in public. A nearly forgotten feature is the private alley called Broadway Alley, between 26th and 27th Streets, halfway between Lexington and Third Avenues, reputedly the last unpaved street in Manhattan; it is not known what this alley is named after, since it is not near the main Broadway.

More information: The New York Times

Bellevue Hospital (officially NYC Health+ Hospitals/Bellevue and formerly known as Bellevue Hospital Center) is a hospital in New York City and the oldest public hospital in the United States.

One of the largest hospitals in the United States by number of beds, it is located at 462 First Avenue in the Kips Bay neighbourhood of Manhattan, New York City. 

Bellevue is also home to FDNY EMS Station 08, formerly NYC EMS Station 13.

Historically, Bellevue was popularly associated with its treatment of mentally ill patients such that Bellevue became a local pejorative slang term for a psychiatric hospital.

This is long past the case as the hospital since developed into a comprehensive major medical center over the years, including outpatient, specialty, and skilled nursing care, as well as emergency and inpatient services. The hospital contains a 25-story patient care facility and has an attending physician staff of 1,200 and an in-house staff of about 5,500.

Bellevue is a safety net hospital, providing healthcare for individuals regardless of their insurance status or ability to pay. It handles over half a million patient visits each year.

In 2014 Bellevue was ranked 40th overall best hospital in the New York metro area and 29th in New York City by U.S. News & World Report.

More information: The Bowery Boys History

Bellevue traces its origins to the city's first permanent almshouse, a two-story brick building completed in 1736 on the city common, now City Hall Park.

In 1798, the city purchased Belle Vue farm, a property near the East River several miles north of the settled city, which had been used to quarantine the sick during a series of yellow fever outbreaks. The hospital was formally named Bellevue Hospital in 1824.

By 1787, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons had assigned faculty and medical students to Bellevue. Columbia faculty and students would remain at Bellevue for the next 181 years, until the restructuring of the academic affiliations of Bellevue Hospital in 1968.

New York University faculty began to conduct clinical instruction at the hospital in 1819. 

In 1849, an amphitheater for clinical teaching and surgery opened. 

In 1861, the Bellevue Hospital Medical College, the first medical college in New York with connections to a hospital, was founded.

By 1873, the nation's first nursing school based on Florence Nightingale's principles opened at Bellevue, followed by the nation's first children's clinic in 1874 and the nation's first emergency pavilion in 1876; a pavilion for the insane, an approach considered revolutionary at the time, was erected within hospital grounds in 1879. For that reason, the name Bellevue is sometimes used as a metonym for psychiatric hospitals. Mark Harris in New York called it the Chelsea Hotel of the mad.

Bellevue initiated a residency training program in 1883 that is still the model for surgical training worldwide. The Carnegie Laboratory, the nation's first pathology and bacteriology laboratory, was founded there a year later, followed by the nation's first men's nursing school in 1888. By 1892, Bellevue established a dedicated unit for alcoholics.

In 1902, the administrative Bellevue and Allied Hospitals organization were formed by the city, under president John W. Brannan. B&AH also included Gouverneur Hospital, Harlem Hospital, and Fordham Hospital. B&AH opened doors to female and black physicians. In the midst of a tuberculosis epidemic a year later, the Bellevue Chest Service was founded.

In April 2010, plans to redevelop the former psychiatric hospital building as a hotel and conference center connected to NYU Langone Medical Center fell through.

More information: Thrillist

We need to start identifying the triggers
that aggravate mental health issues in our society
-bullying, social media negativity and anxiety,
gender based violence, substance abuse,
stigma around issues such as maternal issues, etc.,
and we need to speak up about these more
and get to the source of the problems.

Sanam Saeed